What you’re going to see in our screenshots and videos are a variety of results, sometimes indistinguishable, and other times enough difference present to raise an eyebrow. When playing at 60 FPS without the lock enabled, you will encounter shadows with high aliasing (blocky edges), and sometimes even shadows missing altogether. With the 30 FPS lock enabled, the edges of shadows are much smoother, and shadows will appear on certain surfaces.

In my opinion, I think Naughty Dog wanted to incorporate the higher quality shadows by default, but simply couldn’t get the game to run smoothly enough, opting to lower the intensity of shadow quality when running at 60 FPS. After all, in the case of PC games shadows are usually the first thing to go when performance takes a dive.

During my playtime with the 30 FPS lock disabled, I didn’t necessarily notice the blocky shadows during gameplay. The only occasions where they caught my attention is when I was looking for them, or a shadow was flickering (uncommon).

I'm not the type of dude to sacrifice 60fps for anything (especially shadows... shadow filtering and res are literally the first things to go when I need to lower settings) but that they're willing to enable enhanced visual elements for those who choose 30fps is fantastic middle ground.

I don't get why y'all are predicting a fucked up thread. This is whynotboth.gif and it's great

Originally Posted by The Icon

Nice, was going to lock it at 30 anyway. Worked great for Killzone and Infamous.

Yeah because those were games that weren't hitting 60fps all the time. This very well could and IMO there's no reason to switch to 30fps at all in that event.

...so we're suddenly pretending 30 FPS massively reducing resource usage is unusual? I don't get the freak out. They actually did something with the extra oomph from 30FPS, and they did it without taking 60 FPS out of the game.

Nice! I think it's a good trade off. Lower frame rate for higher visual fidelity, or higher frame rate with slightly less visual fidelity. You're not locked in either way, so adjust to your needs. Looks like console gaming is inching ever closer to PC gaming with the graphical option stuff.